Romain Duris

DaaaaaalĂ­!

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Edouard Baer as Dali

Surrealist film-maker makes film about surrealist artist shock. DaaaaaalĂ­! is the result, and you wonder why Quentin Dupieux, who’s only a semi-serious surrealist really, didn’t do it before. Dupieux starts off with a bit of comedy. Judith, a nervous young reporter played by AnaĂŻs Demoustier, stands in a corridor with the great painter’s assistant, awaiting his arrival. Here he comes, says the right-hand woman, and indeed it is the legend himself, barrelling towards them down the corridor, his signature moustache pointing skyward, his mouth working at a mile a minute as this ball of self-regard and practised eccentricity approaches them. Except he never seems quite to arrive. In a scene familiar from an … Read more

The Animal Kingdom

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Émile out in the forest

The original title of The Animal Kingdom is Le RĂšgne Animal, because it’s a French movie. That’s why you most likely haven’t heard of it and also probably why it isn’t the global phenomenon it should be. First, let’s be clear that it’s nothing to do with Animal Kingdom, David MichĂŽd’s superbly gnarly Australian crime drama from 2010, or its US TV spin-off, or the metaphysical experimental Irish movie of the same name. The Animal Kingdom is a beast of an entirely different colour, one that’s watched an awful lot of Steven Spielberg movies. Director Thomas Cailley borrows the mood, structures and tropes of Spielberg in playful, corny ET mode to tell the … Read more

The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan

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François Civil as D'Artagnan

As handsome as its star, François Civil, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was shot back-to-back with its bookend companion, The Three Musketeers: Milady, a pair of old-school spirited adventures full of flashing eyes and flashing blades. I read somewhere that it’s quite tonally different from other Musketeer movies. It didn’t seem so to me. I only recently watched its century-old predecessor, 1921’s The Three Musketeers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and that is pretty much identical to this in storyline and feel. But then all Musketeer movies tell the same story – Alexandre Dumas’s original tale must be one of the least messed about with in moviedom. D’Artagnan, the cocksure whelp from Gascony, arrives in Paris and … Read more

Eiffel

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Adrienne and Gustave dance on the tower

“Librement inspirĂ© de faits rĂ©els,” it says at the beginning of Eiffel. Not a mere “inspired by real events”, often used as an apology for serving up historical fact laced with made-up stuff, but “freely inspired”. Turn to Wikipedia if what you want is the actual factual, in other words. That’s what I did, and can tell you that the background to this story is pretty much all true, depending on what you call the background, which Eiffel isn’t entirely sure about either. In opening scenes Gustave Eiffel, engineer extraordinaire, stares out at Paris from the tower he gave his name to – handy if you’ve no idea who he was – before Eiffel cycles … Read more

Dans Paris

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Louis Garrel and Romain Duris in Dans Paris

Since The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Romain Duris has been pretty much the hottest name in French cinema. There’s plenty of opportunity for him to do some high intensity scowling in this claustrophobic drama about a family whose secret, its driving force, is depression. His dad (the excellent Guy Marchand) is clearly wrestling with it, his brother (Louis Garrel) has flown off in the other direction and is banging anything female that moves and now Paul (Duris) is in deep trouble too. There’s a bad attack of the narrative cutes at the outset of Christophe Honoré’s latest film, when Garrel turns to the camera and addresses it directly. But give the film … Read more

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

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de battre mon coeur sest arrete 780082l imagine

Now here is a thing – a film that starts out as a sort of French Mean Streets but ends up in quite different territory. Romain Duris is the young Robert De Niro in question, a thug, we learn early on, with a heart of pure coal and with a surprising gift. He plays the piano like a maestro. Or used to. The film’s narrative tension springs from this internal split – is he going to carry on throwing squatters out onto the streets and smashing up their apartments so the developers can move in? Or is he going to return to the relaxed, elegant world of the piano? The masculine world of … Read more